Black Sea (33 page)

The Comnenian Empire began here in
1204,
after the Crusaders had stormed and sacked Constantinople; Alexis Comnenos, son of the Byzantine emperor, escaped to Trebizond and made it his capital. A stroke of commercial luck ensured that the Comnenian state would survive and flourish even after the Greek emperors had regained the throne at Constantinople. In the mid-thirteenth century, the Mongol conquest of Persia opened a new, southern branch of the 'Silk Routes' which began at Tabriz and ended, after crossing the Pontic Mountains, at Trebizond.

Professor Anthony Bryer, who in our own times is the historiographer-imperial of the Comnenoi, lays emphasis on the compactness of this Pontos which was governed from Trebizond, 'hemmed like the Lebanon and south Caspian by its Alps .. . select by climate and geography'. Coastal agriculture, once oil, wine and grain but now nuts, tea and tobacco, is fringed with temperate rain forests 'which give way to summer pastures, overlooking the dry highlands of Armenia, upon which the Pontos turns its back to face the Black Sea'.

From the beginning, the Greek settlement here was unlike those on the other Black Sea coasts. It was a settlement in depth, reaching up into the wooded valleys of the interior. Behind the usual city-colonies along the shore, 'Greek-speaking settlement extended inland to the watershed'. In the time of the Comnenoi, the relatively tiny city of Trebizond enjoyed a turbulent urban and political life, but the mass of the population lived in the hills behind, growing crops and driving their beasts up to high pastures in summer. Most of these Christian peasants were the tenantry of a chain of opulently endowed monasteries which perched along the steep flanks of the valleys; as Bryer says, 'a monastic economy of almost Tibetan proportions'.

Apart from the cities, this rural Pontic society amounted to far the greatest concentration of Greek-speaking population in the Hellenic or Byzantine worlds — much more numerous than that of the Peloponnese, Constantinople finally fell to Mehmet the Conqueror in
1453,
and Trebizond was captured by the Turks in
1461
after a siege of forty-two days. But the Pontic Greeks remained in their valleys and villages, and the monasteries clung to their wealth and most of their estates for many more centuries. Many people, including some of the great families of Trebizond, converted in a superficial way to Islam, but continued to speak Pontic Greek - a language which over the millennia had steadily diverged from the tongue spoken in the Aegean or in the capital of the Byzantine Empire.

Who did they think they were, in this pre-nationalist age? In the first place, they did not think of themselves as 'Greek' or as a people in some way rooted in the peninsula and islands we now call 'Greece'. Sophisticates in Trebizond might address one another in the fifteenth century as 'Hellenes', but this was a cultural fancy rather than an ethnic description. Outsiders, whether Turks or northern Europeans, referred to them and to all the inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire as 'Rom' or 'Rum' people, or as 'Romanians' — citizens of the Roman Empire, in other words, who were also distinguished by their Orthodox Christian faith. Struggling with these categories, a Pontic Turk whose village had once been Greek told Anthony Bryer: 'This is Roman (Rum) country; they spoke Christian here . .. '

The people of the Pontic valleys and cities themselves seemed to find identity in three things: in belonging to a place or
patris
which could be as small as a village, in not being Western (Roman Catholic) Christians, and in feeling themselves to be members of a polity which was so ancient, so sacred and superior to all others that it scarcely required a name. We call this community, weakly enough, 'the Eastern Empire', or 'Byzantium'. That cannot convey the almost Chinese degree of significance which the 'Rom' people attached to the Empire even long after it had been overthrown, as if it were the eternal essence of all political community in comparison to which other states and realms were only transient realities.

We call the imperial capital Constantinople or Byzantium; the Vikings called it Micklegard; the Turks called it Istanbul, which is no more than the three Greek words
eis tin polin
- 'into the City'. And for its citizens, whether they lived within its walls or in Pontus or Georgia or Crimea or at the Danube mouths, that was its name: 'The City'. There was no other. Nor was it possible that this city could come to an end except in a purely phenomenal way. The essence was indestructible. Inevitably, its earthly manifestation would return.

This is a Pontic folk-song composed five hundred years ago, when the news of the fall of Constantinople reached Trebizond:

A bird, a good bird, left the City, it settled neither in vineyards nor in orchards, it came to settle on the castle of the Sun. It shook one wing, drenched in blood, it shook the other wing, it had a written paper. Now it reads, now it cries, now it beats its breast. 'Woe is us, woe is us, Romania is taken.
'
The churches lament, the monasteries weep, and St John Chrysostom weeps, he beats his breast. Weep not, weep not, St John, and beat not your breast. Romania has passed away, Romania is taken. Even if Romania has passed away, it will flower and bear fruit again.

To visit the monastery at Sumela, you have to go to the Taksim Meydane at Trabzon and find the old man with the Bel-Air Chevrolet. Then it is a matter of sitting on a low wall in the sun until the old man has found enough fellow-travellers to fill the car. The Bel-Air, whose engine drinks a fuel tank the size of a small Byzantine cistern every day, is expensive to run.

The car heads inland, up the main road which leads to Gumushane (Argyropolis), the silver-mine city at the head of the valley. After a few miles, the Bel-Air turns off and follows a long forest ravine with a noisy river. Cowled, mediaeval figures urge heifers over bridges made of logs, or scythe hay on the verges. Thirty miles from Trabzon, the car stops. The ravine has become a gorge of naked rock soaring above pine forest. The river makes echoes. The sky is a blue slit overhead.

Far above, something broken is clinging to a cliff-face. It resembles the remains of a swallow's nest, after a fierce broom has swept the eaves. This is Sumela, the 'Holy, Imperial, Patriarchal and Stavropegic Monastery of the All-Holy Mother of God on Mount Mela', endowed by at least five of the Grand Comnenian emperors of Trebizond, once owner of the entire valley and all its villages.

A path, sometimes a staircase, goes zigzagging up the cliff from the river below, and it takes a strenuous half-hour's climb through the black pines and azaleas to reach the monastery. The place was built on a ledge, only a few hundred feet from the top, which reaches back into the mountain in a broad, shallow cave. Everywhere there are ruins. But these are hate-ruins, rather than time-ruins: the gutted walls of the hostel leaning out over the gulf, the blackened holes where timber buildings and galleries stood, the scarred doors of stone chapels whose interiors have been vandalised. The inmost shrine, a cave-shelter constructed against the living rock, was plastered and then covered with frescoes. Now the plaster is sagging off, hanging away from the rock in dark scabs painted in dim colours. Vast heads of the Madonna and the Pantocrator look down, and a Comnenian emperor with his court is visible in the half-light. Everything within reach is defaced with graffiti, names and dates, mostly Turkish but often — curiously enough — Greek, from the years before the
Katastrofe.
Here and there, square holes in the ceiling-plaster and long vertical scars on the walls show where professional art thieves have used power tools, cutting out sections of fresco destined for the auction houses of London and New York.

Outside, in the brilliant sunlight on the ledge, water is falling from a spring a hundred feet overhead, at the tip of the cliffs overhang. Each gout of water separates into glittering drops as it floats down through the air, finally hitting the ledge with a shrill crash. A muddy pool has formed there, under a signpost inscribed in Turkish and English: 'Sacred Water'. Nearby, there are builders' fences and scaffolding and men wheeling cement bags down planks. Restoration is under way. But it is difficult to imagine how Sumela looked in the eighteenth century when the Abbot Christoforos and his twenty-three Elders received delegations bringing tributes of gold coin from as far away as Moldavia, or when Victorian scholars from Europe snuffled and squinted over manuscripts in the monastery's library - now no more than a painted sign on a wall leading to a thousand feet of empty air; or when Sumela was abandoned for ever in
1923.

When a cult began on this ledge, nobody knows. A fourteenth-century inscription says that the monastery was founded 'by the Emperor, Master of Orient and Occident', but there must have been a shrine here long before then. The old myth of Sumela says that St Luke painted an icon of the Madonna which was taken to Athens, but that the Madonna, growing tired of the sinful city, persuaded several angels to arrange her escape. She flew across the Aegean and the Black Sea, and then swooped down to hide in the cavern under the cliff. Here she was finally rediscovered by two detective monks sent from Athens, Barnabas and Sophronios, who decided not to extradite her back to Greece but to build a new monastery around her icon on the mountain.

Sumela's first period of glory was in the time of the Comnenians of Trebizond. Alexis
III
(1349-90)
was a special patron. Saved from a tempest by the intercession of the Madonna's icon, he paid for the reconstruction of the monastery and, in
1361,
climbed up there to watch an eclipse of the sun. The second prosperity arrived in the eighteenth century, long after the Turkish conquest, when the Gumushane silver mines were opened up. The archbishops of Chaldia, the region around Gumushane, took Sumela under their wing and paid for more building, more wall-paintings and the restoration of the mediaeval frescoes. They could afford to: most of them came from the Phytianos clan, the family which held the silver-mining contracts from the sultan.

The Turkish guide-books on sale in the Taksim Meydane offer this account of the
1923
Katastrofe:
'After the proclamation of the Republic, the Greeks who lived in the region returned to their own country, and the monastery of Sumela was evacuated and abandoned.' Their own country? Returned? They had lived in the Pontos for nearly three thousand years. Their Pontic dialect was not understandable to twentieth-century Athenians. Their world was the Black Sea littoral, and their family connections abroad, by the twentieth century, were with the enormous Pontic Greek emigration which had already settled in the Russian Empire: in the Caucasus, Crimea and the lands around the Sea of Azov.

Yet the guide-books are not entirely wrong. All through the nineteenth century, two historical forces worked on the antique community of the Pontic Greeks with growing intensity: an ideology and a practicality. One was Greek nationalism, radiating from Constantinople and then from Athens, at once modernising and romantic. The other was the rise of Russian power around the Black Sea, and the successive wars which advanced Russia into the Balkans in the West and down into the coastal regions of the Caucasus in the East. Each war, increasing the tensions between Christians and the Ottoman authorities in Anatolia, led to an outflow of Greeks into the welcoming Russian Empire and to an inflow of Moslem refugees, mostly from the Caucasus, into the Pontos. After the Russian-Turkish war of
1828—9,
some
42,000
Greeks, almost a fifth of the Pontic population, followed the withdrawing Russian armies. More Greeks left after the Crimean War, settling mainly in Georgia and Crimea, and another emigration took place after the
1877—8
war between Russia and Turkey, until by about
1880
nearly
100,000
Greeks had taken refuge under the Christian protection of the tsar. The last of these movements took place during the First World War. Russian troops advancing along the south coast of the Black Sea occupied Trebizond for two years, between
1916
and
1918,
and when they withdrew another
80,000
Greeks departed with them, fearing reprisals.

The 'Pontic Renaissance', by contrast, came from the West. All round the Black Sea, the Greek communities flung themselves into the huge commercial opportunities of the nineteenth century, into shipping, banking, tobacco-growing and manufacturing industry. They used their prosperity not only for investment but for enlightenment and culture. George Maraslis, for example, whose family came from Plovdiv in modern Bulgaria, was mayor of Odessa from
1897
to
1907;
with his personal wealth, he founded schools, libraries, publishing houses and teacher-training colleges not only in Odessa but in Thrace, Plovdiv ('Phillipopolis'), Salonica, Corfu and Athens.